The Haunted Honey
by The Dragon Politic
Summary: What can one do when Gilderoy Lockhart entrenches himself in one's home? Well, if one is Matilda Wormwood and the Lockhart in question has ill intentions for said wandless witch's mother, the answer is quite a lot. summer 1992, 1st in Wormwood series


_The Haunted Honey _

What can one do when a Gilderoy Lockhart entrenches himself in one's home? Well, if one is Matilda Wormwood and the Lockhart in question has ill intentions for said wandless witch's adopted mother, the answer is quite a lot. (summer of 1992, 1st in Wormwood series)

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Chapter 1  
Holograph

Matilda's Diary

KEEP OUT

_It has been almost two years since the Wormwoods fled the country just ahead of Interpol, since the Trunchbull left under shall we say rather more mysterious circumstances, since life with Mum has gone just swimmingly. I couldn't be ha_

_Oh, what's the use of lying to myself? Fine: it happened again._

_I was in the garden. My foot found a wasp's nest. Suddenly, I had a fair idea of what it must have been like for the Egyptians during those plagues. I fell back, screaming, and then instead of stings I felt flower petals falling all around me._

_I altered matter. Hemolymph into chlorophyll. Vespula germanica into Narcissus poeticus. The flowers are stuffed into a jar. I set it in the cubby under the loose board and now I'm afraid to look at it. This is a far cry from making a water pitcher wobble in anger or, with extreme focus, levitating a piece of chalk. There was no thought involved in this at all! _

_I'm afraid to tell Mum. She was so happy when it stopped and I started to do normal things, like study biology and algebra. Normal people do learn biology and algebra. They do not thoughtlessly shatter the laws of science! _

_The first time, it went away. Mum said it was because my mental energy was being channeled in learning, the way it was supposed to. So I'll just have to study harder, and it will go away again._

_I hope._

Matilda Honey blinked slowly as she read her last diary entry over again. Was this a joke? Who were the Wormwoods, what was a Trunchbull, and what idiot thought it was possible to convince her that she had the magical power to levitate chalk? Furthermore, she had no business knowing biology and algebra. She was eight!

'And yet, this is in my handwriting,' a small voice in her head whispered.

"Eight!" she snarled out loud. The penmanship was far too nice. She liked to pride herself on being neat, but this tight, methodical script couldn't be hers. Grabbing the forgotten pencil, she scrawled on the page, 'This is not funny! Whoever you are, stay out of my diary!' and then stopped and blinked.

It was written in her handwriting, or else someone had made a very good study of hers. Even then, that scenario wouldn't explain why she had been positive a moment ago that her letters were large, loopy, and still a little wobbly. The two sentences she had written were none of those things.

Her normal summer's day had suddenly become very strange. Even a bit frightening.

Matilda scanned the entry again. "The cubby under the loose board," she read and looked down at her floor. She glanced at her dollhouse in the corner. The indecision of how to spend her afternoon lasted for about a second. Darting over to the corner, she dropped to her knees and methodically worked left to right, testing the wooden slats. Her pink tights had terrible runs in them by the time she found it hidden under the rug at the foot of her bed, but she didn't care. She was on the hunt. Even if this was a joke, someone had put a lot of effort into it, and you had better believe she was going to find out who did this to her room and diary. Oh, would they be sorry.

The first thing she pulled out of the hole was a large glass pickle jar. Packed tightly in it, a little soaked in dill, were hundreds of white flowers. Setting it aside, she reached for the other object: the old painted tin. She thought it might be hard to open, but the lid lifted easily; the hinges didn't even squeak. A newspaper clipping lay on top, detailing the arrest of a man named Marcel for illegal, under-the-table dealings involving house sales. He sounded like a nasty piece of work. Mostly it involved tax evasion, officially selling a house at rock-bottom while secretly receiving a large sum of cash from the buyer. The pièce de résistance, though, was a shady deal put together between Marcel and a widower's children, their intent to force the poor man out of his home and split the proceeds. There was a picture included of Marcel. He was a lank, dark-haired man with an incredible Roman nose—Matilda touched her own self-consciously—and a fearsome snarl.

Matilda blinked slowly, wondering why the article seemed off. It looked normal enough. It was printed on newspaper, with a normal title and byline. There was even a photographer credit. She read the headline aloud. "L'homme Achète une Maison, est Arrêté." It sounded normal enough. Frowning still, she set it down. There were several other clippings in the tin, and then dozens of photographs. She recognized two of the faces in the snapshots and formal portraits. The first was Marcel. He looked almost nice in the oldest photos, but as the years passed, he adopted slicked back hair and dress attire that, if not for the color, would have been quite sharp. He had traded in a content smile for a wide, smarmy grin at one point, and that made Matilda feel bafflingly sad. Marcel usually stood with a beautified blonde woman, who ballooned with weight as the photos progressed, and with a lanky boy, clearly the progeny of the pair, who seemed to being growing up quite handsome but unfortunately was also picking up his parents' more awkward mannerisms along the way.

It was the girl, though, that gave her a shock of recognition. A tiny, dark-haired mite with drooping black socks peered around the woman, and there she was again, younger and almost swallowed up by lace in the corner of a professional family portrait. What was she doing with these people?

Matilda felt sick. What was she doing with these people? She shoved the photos and the clippings back into the tin, dropped it into the hidey-hole in the floor, reached for the flower jar, and froze. It was filled to the brim with wasps, writhing, buzzing, and otherwise looking mad as, well, hornets. She whipped around to face her bedroom doorknob. It was still locked. In a flash, she pushed the jar down into the hole, replaced the board, threw the rug over the offending spot, and pounced the diary on her bed in one flying leap.

'It happened again.'

'I altered matter.'

"Levitating a piece of chalk," she muttered. She stared at the pencil lying forgotten by her pillow. "Alright," she said pragmatically. "Something very odd is going on here. Hidey holes don't appear from nowhere, people don't end up in other family's old photographs, and flowers don't turn into bugs when you're not looking. Fact: they do. Hypothesis: I've gone mad!" She gulped. "Alternate hypothesis…" She glared at the pencil, willing it to float, to wobble, to change into a begonia: in short, to do anything that would prove she hadn't gone around the bend. It sat there.

"Blast! Just _move!"_ she barked in a fierce whisper. It moved. Flew across the room. Impaled one of her dolls through the eye.

As the toy lay on the bookshelf among its many friends, looking like the property of either a future crime analyst or sociopath, Matilda could only say, "Now that I think on it, I _hate_ dolls." Then she blinked and looked from the bed to the shelf rapidly, tracing the pencil's trajectory with her widening eyes. Confronted with a bizarre situation, there was only one thing to do.

In a tumble of hose-clad feet, she rushed down the stairs into the kitchen and yelled, "Mum!"

Jennifer Honey almost dropped her spatula. She whirled around. Her free hand slapped onto her chest and tried to clutch at her heart through the bulky, gingham-patterned oven mitt. "Matilda!" she gasped. "Don't do that!"

"Mum, I can't remember!" Matilda blurted.

Her mother's brow knitted. "Well, remember what?"

Matilda stopped short. "I don't remember," she said, mystified. "I was going to write in my diary, but then I saw an old entry about this jar, and, Mum, I don't remember writing any of it!"

"Well, Matilda," Jennifer laughed in fond exasperation. "You've had that diary for years. Of course you wouldn't remember. That's why we write things down: so we won't forget." That logic, of course, fell apart when the entry was dated only yesterday. Before Matilda could inform her mother of that fact, though, she found a plate of cheesy ham pastries pressed into her hands. "Now, be a dear, won't you? Go give this to your father. He's in his office, working on that book again. "

"But…"

Jennifer tucked a blond curl behind her ear. "Matilda, I'm sorry, but I'm really very busy." She gestured to the counter. Together mother and daughter took in the thick spread of baking supplies for as far as the eye could see.

Sensing that it was best to let the matter rest for the moment, Matilda put a sweet smile on her face and left to find her father.

When she opened the door to the office, her father jerked and spun around. He blinked at her a moment before smiling broadly and calling out, "Daughter! What are you doing in here?"

Dutifully she held up the plate. "Mum wanted…"

"Ah, repast! Well, bring it here. Don't be slow about it. My word! What have you done to your hosiery?" She looked down at her knees. "Never mind. Children are children, I suppose. Bring it here!" He shifted loose papers around until there was finally a clear spot on the desk. "Come now!"

Matilda set down the plate. As her father attacked a pastry, she tilted her head at what looked like a handwritten title sheet for a manuscript. "Insert Word Here…With the Haunted Honey, by Gilderoy Lockhart… Dad, who is Lockhart, and shouldn't that W be in lower case? It's a preposition, after all."

Roy Honey's jaw dropped, his mouth full. "You can _read?"_ he asked.

She frowned. "I should think. I'm eight."

"Oh. Yes, well, time flies and all that. Hrm."

"So, who is he?"

"Who?"

"Gilderoy Lockhart."

He laughed nervously. "Oh him. He's me, you see. A nom de plume. Oh, you wouldn't know what that means..."

"Your penname," she cut in, getting a bit miffed. "Or quill name, I suppose would be more accurate."

"Quill! Who said anything about quills?"

"You did. Nom de plume means, more or less, the name of your feather. And a feather used as a writing implement is a quill, am I right?"

"Quite right." He looked at her strangely. "You're a bright little bint, aren't you? How very odd."

"Dad!" she gasped. "What is that supposed to mean?"

He stood and grasped her arm. "Nothing," he replied, pulling her out of the office. "Now why don't you run along? It's a lovely summer's day. Play with those pretty dolls I made you. Get!"

Matilda could only stare dumbly at him as he slammed the door in her face.

As she wandered back upstairs, passing her mother still busy with the baking, she couldn't shake the feeling that, of everything today, the short encounter with her father had been the one most horribly wrong. And that was saying something. She stopped at the door to her room atop the attic stairs and intently watched the doorknob turn, seemingly all on its own, but really by some invisible force of her own concentration.

That was really, really saying something.

Sighing, she returned to the diary on her bed. Perhaps she could manage to sit down and write this time without her entire world changing. After remembering to retrieve the poor pencil from the doll, she settled down and turned from the strange entry to the next page—and froze. In her handwriting, rushed, a bit sloppy, but undeniably hers, were written eight words:

"Gilderoy not father," she whispered. "He got Mum. Don't trust."

Oh, dear.

Matilda would always swear that her head swiveled on its own towards the mangled baby doll that, had it lived, would have been oozing brain matter onto an otherwise empty shelf. The startled blink was all her doing, though, as she suddenly wondered where all of her books had gone, and so were the clenched fists. A frightening clarity settled upon her. In three strides, she returned to the floor's loose board on her floor. She tossed away that board, plunged her hand down into the hole, seized the tin within, and upended its contents. Clippings and Polaroids flew everywhere before a folded packet of heavy white papers dropped to the ground. This last item she opened and, sure enough, she was holding the adoption papers of one Matilda Wormwood by one _Miss _Jennifer Honey.

Matilda's mind spun into overdrive. There was no father, unless one counted the pathetic thief sitting in a French prison under an apparently false name. Nor was there a Roy. Only a Gilderoy, according to Matilda's own handwriting, and Gilderoy was not her father. She crumpled the adoption papers with a snarl. Gilderoy had changed her memories; slip-shoddily, true, but well enough to make her seethe, betrayed, at the discovery. Gilderoy had taken over her house. Gilderoy had put her in pink tights and given her useless dolls. Gilderoy had made her mother a slave in her own kitchen and…

Gilderoy, Matilda reflected as she resolutely picked up the jar of angry wasps, was bad. Then again, as she was beginning to recall, in foggy snatches, she was hardly innocent herself. So it was without guilt that she stood and stealthily crept in the direction of the office with the wasps in tow, hellbent on revenge and, if possible, abject humiliation.

Gilderoy had thrown away her books.

That meant war.

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A/N: Matilda and Harry Potter, Roald Dahl and JK Rowling, respectively. The combination was just too fitting to resist.


End file.
